Olympic mathlete

STOCKTON - James Graham will realize his Olympic dream thanks to his ingenuity.

Jagdip Dhillon

STOCKTON - James Graham will realize his Olympic dream thanks to his ingenuity.

The Pacific water polo coach will conduct statistical analysis for the United States national team at the London Games beginning July 29, utilizing a software program he created and developed in the past eight months. Graham will watch most of the Olympic water polo matches live and input data into his MacBook to try to give the U.S. team an edge to improve upon its silver-medal finish at the 2008 Games in Beijing.

"I always wanted to go to an Olympics and be a part of it - as an athlete, coach even as a ref," Graham said. "I essentially record every action that happens in the game. It's a nuanced look at how the other teams are going to operate tactically. To be able to provide the national team something that may help make a difference is unbelievable."

Graham, who has been Pacific's men's coach since 2008 and added the women's job to his duties last month, will leave for London next week and said he's thankful to his wife, Kelly, and Pacific athletic director Ted Leland for letting him take time away from his family and job to realize his Olympic dream.

Graham was a mathematics major as well as a standout in the pool at the University of Redlands and had long believed a marriage of his two passions could yield meaningful data for coaches. Graham said he was partially inspired by "Moneyball," Michael Lewis' book about how the Oakland Athletics used advanced statistical analysis in baseball to gain an edge in evaluating talent.

Graham began developing simple concepts to measure different aspects of water polo with assistant coach Zac Koerner and shared his thoughts with former Pacific standout Grant Hollis last December. Hollis, now working on his doctorate in civil engineering at Cal Tech, was receptive to Graham's ideas about proving or disproving things that were readily accepted within the sport.

"There are a lot of rules of thumb in water polo," said Hollis, who was an All-American and team captain at Pacific from 2005-09. "People throw out stats, but no one had put in the work to look into these things to see how true they were. So we decided we're smart enough to figure this out."

Graham began breaking down tape of the 2011 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation season and figuring out things like how many times teams scored with a one-man advantage or how many times a particular club was successful in a particular offensive formation. The data was then inputted into Excel files, as Graham and Hollis sought a way to make sense of the numbers. Graham then went to John Mayberry, an assistant math professor at Pacific, who helped him sort through the data.

"We had to figure out what is and isn't useful and then build mathematical models to get accurate results," Mayberry said. "It's unchartered territory, so it makes it an exciting venture to make sense out of this complicated data."

Graham eventually gleaned tendencies and statistics that would be useful to coaches creating game plans and decided to pitch the usage of his newly created system to U.S. men's national coach Terry Schroeder. Graham was friendly with the coaching staff, having been an assistant for the U.S. junior national team in 2006-07, and had a meeting with them April 19.

Schroeder was impressed enough to hire Graham to scout the Dublin Cup in Germany for the U.S. earlier this month and be with the team at the London Games. Graham said he eventually plans to patent his still unnamed software program, but for now it remains a series of Excel files that would be gibberish to most anyone else, but make perfect sense to his development team.

"It started with just looking at different aspects of the game and seeing if we found anything interesting," Hollis said. "If it actually influences the Olympics, that would be absolutely amazing."